Helena Noronha (Mathematics) has received $342,619 from the National Science Foundation in continuing support of a project entitled “CSU Alliance for Preparing Undergraduates through Mentoring towards PhDs.”

Charles Hanson, Shari Tarver-Behring (Educational Psychology & Counseling), and Sheri Strahl (Health Sciences) have received $173,094 from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services in support of a project entitled “Unserved/Underserved Victim Advocacy and Outreach.”

California State University, Northridge paleoanthropologist Hélène Rougier has uncovered one of the biggest finds in her field — the first identified remains of cannibalized Neandertals in Northern Europe.

The remains are part of the 21-drawer collection of bones excavated from the Goyet cave in Belgium found more than 150 years ago and are stored at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. Details of Rougier’s discovery were published in the science journal Scientific Reports ​​on July 6.

CSUN anthropology professor Hélène Rougier (center) identifies human skeletal remains among the collections from the Goyet cave in Belgium with colleagues from her project team, paleoanthropologist Dr. Isabelle Crevecoeur from Bordeaux University (right) and archeozoologist Cédric Beauval from Archéosphère in France (left). Photo provided by Hèléne Rougier.

The cannibalized remains had gone unnoticed for more than 150 years, Rougier said.

“Because the remains are cannibalized, they were broken … [the Neandertals] really broke the bones in many pieces,” she said. “We put aside bones that we wouldn’t have selected normally because they were not diagnostically human. Then we made a puzzle and put them together to show human bones.”

Rougier said the cannibalized remains were located near Neandertal burial sites that are clustered within a 250 kilometer diameter — some as close as 20 kilometers away. She said the findings show that Neanderthals were aware of their dead and had culture, but do not conclusively reveal the reason behind cannibalism.

“It is very interesting how [Neandertals] treated their dead in different ways,” Rougier said. “We are really wondering what it means. Are these enemies? Are these people of their own group? Unfortunately, these are questions we cannot answer. What we know is that they had culture and had some complex behaviors. We don’t know if they made a point to treat them like this.”

Rougier said the discovery was made possible by the interdisciplinary nature and collaboration of other researchers, such as fellow paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur and archaeozoologist Cédric Beauval, who together determined the remains were indeed Neandertal and cannibalized.

Beauval was looking at the Goyet collection to study  animal bones and their usage for retouching stone tools by Neandertals compared to the remains of the Neandertals found. While examining smaller bone fragments, Rougier said, Beauval noted retouching marks, bore holes that went through the bone for Neandertals to get marrow and defleshing scrape marks that were done when the bones were fresh.

“Cédric noted the presence of cut marks on the remains,” Rougier said. “He also studied a sample of the animal remains to compare it to the [Neandertal] remains. Cédric said [the Neandertals] actually really processed them intensively. They really broke the bones in many pieces.”

The Neandertal remains had portions of mitochondrial DNA in them, which two geneticists, Cosimo Posth and Johannes Krause,  used to determine the ancestry of the bones to at least three different people who came from part of the latest known generations of Neandertals, Rougier said.

“We sent the samples to be directly dated and got results that fitted with what we knew were Neandertal times. Some came back too young,” she said. “We tried to get better dates. We got dates that were again really young. We realized there were early modern human remains in [the cave] as well.

“It’s really a multidisciplinary study,” Rougier said. “We had to put the results of different fields to get the results in the article. We identified some human remains with [Crevecoeur], and we checked that they were indeed Neandertal through DNA testing done by the geneticists. We communicated a lot. We knew when one field got some results, we compared them to the results of another field in the study.”

Rougier and some of her colleagues currently are excavating at Saint-Césaire, a cave in western France, where a Neandertal’s remains were found buried in a pit in 1979. Rougier said she aims to continue updating older studies with the use of new technology.

“By doing this work and by using state-of-the-art methods like DNA analysis, we can give a second life to this site on which the work had not been done using today’s standards because it was done early on,” she said. “We are now trying to set the record straight.”

Charles Hanson (Educational Psychology & Counseling) has received $626,378 from the County of Los Angeles-Department of Children and Family Services in continuing support of a project entitled “Family Preservation Program North Hollywood Zip Codes.”

Charles Hanson (Educational Psychology & Counseling) has received $471,762 from the County of Los Angeles-Department of Children and Family Services in continuing support of a project entitled “Family Preservation Program Santa Clarita Zip Codes.”

Charles Hanson (Educational Psychology & Counseling) has received $66,472 from the County of Los Angeles-Department of Children and Family Services in continuing support of a project entitled “Family Preservation Program North Hollywood Zip Codes.”

Richard Moore (Management) has received $22,778 from the CA Office of Legislative Counsel as supplemental support of a project entitled “Legislative Counsel Bureau Consulting and Training Project.”

Taeyou Jung (Kinesiology) has received $17,012 from the City of Los Angeles as supplemental support of a project entitled “Proposition K Maintanance Funds for Brown Center.”

Paula Fischhaber (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has received $103,125 from the National Institutes of Health in continuing support of a project entitled “Recruitment of End-Processing Factors in DSB Repair.”

Ray Hong (Biology) has received $108,750 from the National Institutes of Health in continuing support of a project entitled “Elucidating the function of the Lipid-Binding Protein OBI-1 in Pristionchus pacificus Nematode Chemosensation.”

Yann Shrodi (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has received $108,750 from the National Institutes of Health in support of a project entitled “New Robust Olefin Metathesis Catalysts on Non-Toxic and Abundant Low-Valent Molybdenum.”

Rachel Friedman-Narr and Ellen Schneiderman (Special Education) have received $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Education in continuing support of a project entitled “IDEP: Interdisciplinary Deaf Education Teacher Preparation.”

Charles Hanson, Kim Goldberg-Roth, and Shari Tarver-Behring (Educational Psychology & Counseling) have received $30,000 from the Neighborhood Legal Services of LA County in continuing support of a project entitled “Comprehensive Legal Assistance and Support Services (CLASS).”

Tyler Luchko (Physics & Astronomy) has received $374,867 from the National Science Foundation in support of a project entitled “CDS&E: Fast, Accurate Molecular Solvation Theory for Multiscale Modeling.”

Charles Hanson (Educational Psychology & Counseling) has received $104,396 from the County of Los Angeles – Department of Children and Family Services as supplemental support of a project entitled “Family Preservation Program North Hollywood Zip Codes.”

Charles Hanson (Educational Psychology & Counseling) has received $11,079 from the County of Los Angeles – Department of Children and Family Services as supplemental support of a project entitled “Family Preservation Program North Hollywood Zip Codes.”

When the “noise” of our busy lives gets to be too much, most of us have a place where we go to get away from it all — that quiet corner in a backyard, a bench in the park with a great book, the living room couch nestled with a cup of soothing tea.

Wherever it is, California State University, Northridge psychology professor Erica Wohldmann, who spent more than six months traveling in and living off the United States’ wild lands in 2012, argues that our brains are still distracted — disconnected, actually — from their natural habitat.

“My research is about what happens to us when we become so disconnected,” Wohldmann said. “We spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. We’ve created this world with buildings and doors and fences, and we close each other off. There are all these little distractions that we don’t even notice, manmade sounds that we think we’re tuning out, but our brains are taking all that information and getting distracted by it.”

In May 2012, Wohldmann left urban civilization in her Volkswagen bus, boxes of books on wild plants in tow and with an excitement for returning to what she calls her “animal nature.” Her one rule was to not spend anything on food. For the next six months, Wohldmann would move through 16 different states and experience a deep connection to nature; her senses were heightened and she achieved what psychologists call “flow,” a mental state an individual gains from being completely immersed in the present, often leading to happiness and focus.

What she did not expect, however, was to go hungry on her first day.

“Well, you know, when you say something like ‘I’m going to live in the forest and feed myself wild food,’ you don’t know what it means until you’re in the forest,” she said. “The first day I found a bag of Doritos and a Dr Pepper. I don’t even eat that stuff. That isn’t food, but food-like products. I went, ‘Whoa, how am I going to do this?’”

The next day, her friend met her on his way back from a wedding and gave her leftovers from the celebration that would give her enough sustenance to survive while she settled down and read up on edible plants that she could forage.

“I got all my books out and I started reading and learning,” Wohldmann said. “I learned all about edible plants. I realized that there is so much [food] out there. I never have to worry about being hungry. I felt nurtured by the Earth.”

Wohldmann spoke of her experiences in the wilderness at the University of California, Los Angeles TEDx talk in early May.

More recently, Wohldmann’s journey to understand humanity’s connection to nature took her to Brazil’s rainforests, where she spent weeks under the tropical canopies communing with indigenous people.

The biggest contrast to living in the forests of Brazil compared to the U.S. plains was the food source and environment, she said.

“Here [in the U.S.] when I was foraging, I could live on greens and berries and acorns. I am not a meat eater regularly. But there, it would be really hard to survive without it,” Wohldmann said. “And there is a lot more danger. They have giant poisonous snakes and insects the size of your hand. They eat them. To think that people have lived that way for centuries is just incredible to me. It is something to protect.

“I think most people here in the U.S. think about nature as something that calms them down and relaxes them. [But] we have a perception that nature is capital. The people of the Amazon don’t view nature as a resource that can be bought or sold or owned,” she continued. “They have a more traditional view of nature — that it’s for everyone and for everything, and it should be protected and respected. The animals of the rainforest have equal rights to the land that we do. We don’t think that trees are there for the birds to have nests to have babies that will kill mosquitos. We don’t think about the web of life. We think about capital. When you think about nature, all of life, having the same rights that we do, it’s pretty powerful.”

Wohldmann said she hopes her research will educate and inform others about the benefits of reconnecting to nature through sharing her experiences.

“We have such potential to get connected to all the life around us. My goal as an educator is to make people think — to make conscious and thoughtful decisions,” she said. “That’s the whole purpose of education. The information that we provide for students should stand alone to convince people to change. I really hope that people who learn from me make informed choices. That’s the greater good, benefitting from the information I love to share.”

California State University, Northridge was ranked 13th in graduateprograms.com’s list of the top 50 schools in the nation for graduate programs in social work.

The rating was based on submitted feedback from thousands of students who studied the major at the evaluated institution, as well as data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Assessed categories were campus safety, career advising, quality of instruction, student diversity, networking opportunities, student financial services and satisfaction with degree.

In particular, supportive faculty and extended hands-on opportunities in both the online cohort and the on-campus cohort were praised in the students’ feedback.

“The CSUN MSW program partners with numerous human services agencies in the communities where we place our students,” said Amy Levin, professor and department chair of the Master of Social Work program. “In this field education milieu, MSW students get to know the local community, and members of the local community get to see our MSW students in action.”

Initially, the campus-based program focused on serving struggling communities within the San Fernando Valley. Today, the program includes satellite campuses at College of the Canyons and Ventura College, as well as a global online program, supporting vulnerable communities across the United States and even internationally.

“I’m extremely proud that the Department of Social Work continues to earn such high marks from academia and alumni,” said Stella Theodoulou, dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. “This latest ranking is a reflection of the high quality of our program, students and faculty, is further evidence of CSUN’s importance as a provider of graduate education, and demonstrates the institution’s commitment to serving the region in areas that are critical to the success of California as a state.”

California State University, Northridge will expand its campus this fall with the opening of a new building — the Extended University Commons (EUC). Starting full operations in early August, the EUC, on the west side of campus, will provide students, faculty and staff with extended support, space and technical resources.

“The [EUC] name is a reflection of the college’s purpose within CSUN’s overall mission — to extend the current and emerging educational and research strength of the entire university beyond the campus, to help CSUN better serve communities, employers and working adults in the greater Los Angeles region, and to enhance CSUN’s national and international education reach, influence and collaborative relationships,” said Robert Gunsalus, vice president for University Advancement.

The new building is located at the southeast corner of Darby Avenue and Vincennes Street. The EUC primarily will house the Tseng College, which previously had been located in the campus bookstore complex but had outgrown the space due to the rapid growth of programs and services for working adults, their employers, CSUN’s regional partners and international students over the past decade.

CSUN’s renowned graduate programs — designed to serve mid-career professionals and offered by the university’s colleges in collaboration with the Tseng College — have received multiple honors and awards, such as a first-place ranking for the Master of Social Work online program and a top 50 ranking for the health administration program. CSUN’s expansion of fully online programs is also attracting more and more students from across the nation.

International students also have been increasingly interested in CSUN’s graduate and undergraduate programs, which is why the EUC will house offices for academic advising for new international students along with the Intensive English Program (IEP) and the Tseng College’s International Programs and Partnerships department. In recognition of CSUN’s international reach and achievement, the university received the World Trade Week Export Achievement Award this spring from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

“The thing I’m most excited about with the opening of the Extended University Commons is the opportunity for international students to transition seamlessly from [CSUN’s] Intensive Learning Program to matriculated students,” said Elizabeth Adams, associate vice president of undergraduate studies. “The international advising team and the IEP folks are going to be a dynamic presence for our international student population and will help them with all the academic issues they may face.”

“My hope is that students who enter the IEP will want to continue their education at CSUN and earn their bachelor’s degree here,” added Geraldine Sare, director of academic advisement for first-year international students. “One of the key strategies for success for our international students is integration. But before that can happen, they need to feel welcomed and part of the CSUN community. With a combined partnership from undergraduate studies, international admissions, the International and Exchange Student Center and IEP, students will have the tools to thrive in their new environment.”

Especially in times of globalization, developing and fostering international partnerships is one of the areas of CSUN’s outreach emphasis that will be supported by the facilities and services housed in the EUC, which also supports the growth of global learning for all CSUN students.

“The Valley is very diverse and very interconnected with greater Los Angeles and the global economy,” said Joyce Feucht-Haviar, dean of the Tseng College. “There are few companies in greater Los Angeles that do not have international connections. In that light, it is important for CSUN graduates to be prepared to work across cultural lines and the context of diverse urban communities. CSUN’s students are going to be heading out into a complex world, and we want them to succeed and to lead in that world.”

In addition to connecting students across cultures, the EUC will provide them with advanced technology and connect them to technology-enhanced, active-learning experiences. An entire classroom will be dedicated to these resources and will feature the latest technology, such as the new we-inspire system, to improve student learning. Additionally, video production studios will enhance faculty and student experiences with CSUN’s distance learning, instructional design and technology supported by the Tseng College.

“The building is great in terms of its technology, because it provides us with a lot of opportunities to expand what we’re doing and extend our reach so we can provide every CSUN student with a CSUN experience — whether it’s a distance or on-campus student,” said John Binkley, associate dean of the Tseng College. “We’ve created a collaborative environment for the faculty when they come together to work on the curriculum that allows them to be remote and to be able to participate in their online lectures.”

Other spaces will be used for meeting areas and strategic partner developments. Specific initiatives and programs will be targeted to promote the development of professional relationships between students, faculty and industry leaders. These growing links between CSUN and organizations and industries are essential to the region and the university, Feucht-Haviar noted. The creation of the EUC recognizes the shared future between the university and the greater Los Angeles region it serves, she said.

“In the past, we’ve gone out to the community but haven’t had as many opportunities to bring the community to campus,” Binkley said. “The EUC is designed so that we can actually host conferences. We’re really involved with the economic development in Los Angeles and we participate in a lot of events. Now, we have an opportunity to host some of those events.”

Located at the north end of campus parking lot B4, the new building is 68,470 square feet and offers 10,000 square feet of new classroom space that can be used on weekdays by any of CSUN’s colleges.

“This is an exciting moment for the university,” said Julia Potter, director for strategic partnerships and special initiatives. “It’s really an exemplar of the university turning a page and having a bigger self-vision. Students, faculty, alumni and global economic leaders will benefit from that. It’s an exciting time at CSUN, and the new EUC is just one big example of it.”

With startling new statistics about climate change released every day, many wonder what can be done to stop the environmental crisis facing the Earth.

One person working to make a significant impact by educating future generations of their role in healing the planet is California State University, Northridge professor Helen Cox, who received the Sustainability Champion award recently at the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. Now in its 15th year, the conference is organized by private and public colleges, in hopes of fostering dialogue on the environmental practices of higher education institutions.

Cox has been a faculty member in the Department of Geography since 2000 and director of the CSUN Institute for Sustainability. She participated alongside CSUN professors in a campus group called the Green Core Team. The team was unimpressed with many students’ lack of knowledge about climate change and other global issues. With the support of then-CSUN Provost Harry Hellenbrand, the leaders formed the Institute for Sustainability in 2008 to coordinate the efforts of the different campus departments toward a more green-conscious campus.

Cox became the institute’s director shortly after its beginnings. She immediately got to work, establishing programs to promote sustainable practices in every facet of university life.

“One of the first things we did is create a minor in sustainability,” Cox said. “We think that sustainability is something students should learn along with a selected discipline, and can be paired with anything they’re doing.”

Cox acknowledged she could not have done this without the support of the campus community. CSUN has made great strides toward greater environmental consciousness in recent years — highlighted by the creation of the institute, as well as President Dianne F. Harrison’s participation on a number of boards for national sustainability committees.

Cox also has implemented a number of new programs designed to inform students about practicing sustainability in their daily lives, such as organic farming and composting. Looking ahead, Cox said she hopes the institute will become more involved with the Michael D. Eisner College of Education.

“In order to really affect change over the next few generations, there’s going to be a big element of cultural behavioral change that has to take place — and starting with young people is the best way to affect that change,” she said.

Cox credited her colleagues and university leaders for their work and support after receiving the Sustainability Champion Award.

“I’m very honored to get the award, and I’d like to recognize all the people that made that possible,” Cox said. “The whole Green Core Team and the rest of the staff at the institute — and the support of the president, who has really made a difference.”